1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to aggregation of electronic messages and, more particularly, to aggregation of messages posted to online financial message boards.
2. Related Art
People have long used computer networks to communicate with each other in a variety of ways. Email, for example, enables both one-to-one and one-to-many communication in a way that is analogous to traditional written communications delivered by postal mail. Email became the dominant form of personal communication in the early years of the Internet, perhaps because it is easy to learn how to use and does not require high bandwidth networks or powerful computers to implement.
Email, however, has drawbacks. It is not, for example, useful for many-to-many communications, or for archiving communications for subsequent viewing over the network by those other than the original sender and recipient. Early forms of network communication that addressed these problems were electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) and newsgroups. Such systems allowed users to post messages on particular topics, and for other users to view messages posted on each topics. Newsgroups remain a popular way for people to engage in conversation and find information on particular topics of interest to them.
Such systems, however, have their own drawbacks. For example, newsgroup postings typically are limited to text, or to text with an attached binary file. Newsgroups, in other words, do not provide users with the rich graphical experience they have come to expect from content on the World Wide Web. Similarly, newsgroup user interfaces typically display only a list of messages in each newsgroup, and do not provide additional graphical content that could be used to enhance the user's experience and/or to display advertisements or otherwise generate revenue for the provider of the newsgroup user interface.
At least in part in response to these problems, web sites have been made available which enable users to access email, newsgroups, and other forms of online communication through a web browser. Such web sites typically provide a graphical user interface through which users may write, post, read, and delete messages. Such web sites may also display advertisements or otherwise employ mechanisms that generate revenue for the provider of the graphical user interface. This approach attempts to create a win-win situation for the web site user and provider, by providing the user with powerful communications features and a rich graphical experience, and providing the web site provider with the ability to generate profit from the value it adds to the user's experience.
A newsgroup is one of many kinds of online message boards. One particularly popular kind of online message board is the financial message board, which is used to exchange information about company stock prices and other financial information. Frequent users of financial message boards require highly current and accurate information, due to the speed at which financial information changes and the consequences of making financial decisions based on inaccurate information. To obtain as much accurate information as quickly as possible, such users may scan multiple message boards for messages about a single stock. For example, financial message board users often refer to relevant information about a company hosted on multiple financial portal web sites, such as the company profile, stock charts, competitors, SEC filings, analyst opinions, news, upcoming events, trades made by officers, and other users' rumors. Furthermore, a single user may track a large number of stocks at the same time, while also keeping track of broader economic trends such as fluctuations in interest rates and currency exchange rates.
The unique needs of financial message board users, therefore, create special challenges for those seeking to design user interfaces for such message boards. For example, it is critical to provide the user with all of the information he desires, but within the constraints of the available display screen and network bandwidth, and without providing the user with so much information at once that he becomes overloaded.
Financial message boards also provide a unique opportunity for web site providers. Heavy users of financial message boards tend to be affluent, well-educated, and Internet-savvy. They also tend to be frequent purchasers of financial products and services, and to purchase such products and services over the Internet. Financial message board users, therefore, represent an attractive market to web advertisers. Web sites that provide access to financial message boards using features that attract large numbers of repeat users would therefore likely be capable of generating significant advertising revenue.